Saturday, June 3, 2017

Learning to shoot at someone who out-drew ya

"You fight your
superficiality, your shallowness, so as to try to come at people without
unreal expectations, without an overload of bias or hope or arrogance,
as untanklike as you can be, sans cannon and machine guns and steel
plating half a foot thick; you come at them unmenacingly on your own ten
toes instead of tearing up the turf with your caterpillar treads, take
them on with an open mind, as equals, man to man, as we used to say, and
yet you never fail to get them wrong.|
You might as well have the brain of a tank. You get them wrong before
you meet them, while you're anticipating meeting them; you get them
wrong while you're with them; and then you go home to tell somebody else
about the meeting and you get them all wrong again. Since the same
generally goes for them with you, the whole thing is really a dazzling
illusion empty of all perception, an astonishing farce of misperception.
And yet what are we to do about this terribly significant business of
other people, which gets bled of the significance we think it has and
takes on instead a significance that is ludicrous, so ill-equipped are
we all to envision one another's interior workings and invisible aims?
Is everyone to go off and lock the door and sit secluded like the lonely
writers do, in a soundproof cell, summoning people out of words and
then proposing that these word people are closer to the real thing than
the real people that we mangle with our ignorance every day? The fact
remains that getting people right is not what living is all about
anyway. It's getting them wrong that is living, getting them wrong and
wrong and wrong and then, on careful reconsideration, getting them wrong
again. That's how we know we're alive: we're wrong. Maybe the best
thing would be to forget being right or wrong about people and just go
along for the ride. But if you can do that - well, lucky you."